Kids Are Our Future

I searched the web with the contents in English, although I found the definition of education, I could not find the definition of family education. I found some information on parenting.

There are various families in the world, living in different locations, different countries, with different culture, different belief.

As parents, what role should we play on raising kids? Is it merely to bring up kids by providing them for emotional, physical, social needs? To nurture kids to become independent and competent adults? Is there something more? In order to help kids to succeed in the global society, what the value we should teach them? How to handle the culture difference even the conflict?

In the next several posts, I would like to discuss and explore with all of you about these questions and try to find some of the answers.

What is Education?

Education is defined as the activities of instructing; the gradual process of acquiring knowledge and skills, and also something more profound including critical thinking and well-developed wisdom.
Formal education is known that the students are educated in school, are taught and trained by professional teachers, which currently stresses school curriculum focusing on academic knowledge and specific skills.

What is Family Education?

Informal education includes knowledge and skills learned and refined during the course of life, including education that comes from home and experience in practicing a job.
Parenting is defined as a process of raising and educating a child from birth until adulthood. Parents involved in their children’s education at home, which is called family education.

Family Education’s Role

Family education is the earliest education children receive; parents are their first teacher and the most important teacher of their life. Family education not only provides children academic assistance on their school work, but also, even more importantly provides extra-curricular guidance on cultural values, taught and modeled by parents.

Family education in my opinion does make big difference on the children’s development and success! Because parents know their children best and can act the key role to help their children to achieve high EQ, which is the key factor to achieve success. Family education plays an essential role on helping children moral and spiritual development, and nurturing the child’s natural curiosity and eagerness to learn. Parents’ believes have great impact on children. These are the roots parents can give their children.

The current formal education system provides one curriculum, one teaching environment, and one teaching methodology to fit all students’ learning needs. While we know that each individual child is unique, the most effective way to educate children is to meet the needs of each child by family education.

Family education encourages parents to play a central role in supporting a child’s unique learning style, help the child identify and respect his or her own learning strengths, interests, talents, and needs, help the child discover his or her dreams, passions, and goals, give him or her the wings of motivation and purpose for becoming an eager, self-directed learner. For learning success, the child’s interests, talents, expectations, and goals are best motivators.

Children are adaptable and can adjust with the social environment quickly. In U.S schools, there are many students differ in cultures, values, religion, behaviors, and even language. It is wise for parents to talk to their children about cultures, values, the rules, and regulations, they choose to use in raising their children.

What is culture?

Culture has been studied and defined in many ways by many scholars representing various disciplines. Culture is a framework to our lives. It affects our values, attitudes and behavior. In the meantime, we affect our culture by various behaviors as well. Culture is something that is shared by almost all members of some social group and something that the older generation of the group tries to pass on to the younger generation.

What is Value?

Values can be defined as factors that are explicitly or implicitly desirable and that affect our decisions. Values do not need to be conscious, they can be also unconscious. The values we have are based on our culture.

In family education, parents teach their children based on common values, concepts of good and bad, right and wrong. Values are deeply held beliefs, which usually are based on cultural traditions, and long-lasting memories of personal experiences. Once the value is built, people’s values seldom change.

Value-based Family Education

Family education plays an important role in developing a cultural perspective for cultivation of values on children.

Help children to understand universal core values of truth, peace, love and freedom, which are the backbone of value-based family education, correspondingly correlated with the five major objectives of education, namely value, vision, knowledge, skill, and balance. Family education should aim at multifaceted development of children, their intellectual, physical, spiritual, and ethical development.

This will ensure that children grow in both mind and heart, and learn the special virtues of life. It is important that for children to gain an education for a particular job and the basic skills that are needed to make a living. However, in the present day, there is an urge toward the spirit of coexistence, tolerance, and mutual respect among individuals in the global society.